Eunjung Hwang

The Carnival of Dervishes: Videos, Paintings, and Installations

March 30 - April 22, 2006

Stux Gallery presents the first New York solo exhibition by South Korean artist Eunjung Hwang. Hwang, who studied painting in Korea and earned an MFA in Computer Arts in New York, renders her extraordinary animated imagery in cryptically complex paintings, drawings, large- scale animations and installations.

In these new works, the artist continues to explore the exploits of a devilish cast of characters culled directly from her dreams and complex imagination. “Everything I behold in this world has been compiled into a huge usable mental catalogue of images, and I strive for an encyclopedic achievement there -- I dare to descend into an everlasting image-producing abyss in my memory and explore the undercurrent with a fluoroscopic vision.”

Utilizing free association and stream of consciousness, Hwang’s work assumes the iconography of the locales she frequents. During a recent residency in Innsbruck, Austria located near the Austrian Alps, her animated film, Bestial Delights, 2005, incorporates the crests of Royal families that adorn the castles populating the area. Hwang unleashes her characters on these impassive and stoic icons, turning them into what looks like quasi medieval torture apparatus filled with regurgitating monsters and little children impaled by gigantic swords.

All of the works are originally created by hand on paper and/or canvas. Select images are then “re-drawn” on the computer and executed as archival digital prints, animations books, or installations. The works as a whole are temporal, in constant motion, and hint at a larger ubiquitous nether-world full of mutated citizens, some half animal, half human (or some other ungodly combination of beings) constantly mutating, making love, eating, defecating, killing, or simply stuck moving in endless circles for eternity.